About Journal of Plant Protection

Journal of Plant Protection

The Journal of Plant Protection, known in Chinese as Zhiwu Baohu Xuebao and rendered in Latin as Acta Phytophylacica Sinica, is a Chinese-language research journal published in Beijing since 1962. It carries ISSN 0577-7518 and is associated with China Agricultural University and the China Society of Plant Protection, the national learned society for the discipline. Plant protection — the science of plant diseases, insect and mite pests, weeds and the pesticides and other methods used against them — is one of the foundational disciplines of Chinese agricultural research, and this journal is its long-standing national research title. It publishes original research across plant pathology, agricultural entomology, pesticide science and weed science, and it is recognised as a Chinese core journal indexed in the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD). Its official website operates under the domain zwbhxb.cn, taken from the initials of its Chinese title.

Identity and bibliographic record

The journal's identity is anchored by its ISSN, 0577-7518, which appears consistently in international bibliographic records over many decades. The Japanese J-GLOBAL database, for example, records a 2014 article in volume 41, issue 1, pages 79–86 under the material name Zhiwu Baohu Xuebao (Acta Phytophylacica Sinica) with ISSN 0577-7518, language Chinese and country of issue China; the FAO's AGRIS database likewise carries records in Acta Phytophylacica Sinica under the same ISSN reaching back through the 1980s and 1990s, supplied by the Institute of Agricultural Information of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. This long, consistent record matters because the journal's English name, Journal of Plant Protection, is shared in translation by unrelated journals in other countries; the combination of the Chinese title, the Latin rendering and ISSN 0577-7518 identifies the Beijing title uniquely. Its editorial home is in Beijing, in the orbit of China Agricultural University, whose College of Plant Protection — based at the university's campus in Haidian District, Beijing 100193 — is one of the historic centres of the discipline in China.

Founding in 1962 and historical setting

The journal was founded in 1962, and its early volumes are visible in the international record: a 1965 paper on the biology and control of the litchi stink bug, Tessaratoma papillosa, appeared in volume 4, and work on field control of the same pest with Dipterex had appeared in volume 3 in 1964, evidence of a journal already serving applied field research within its first years. The founding came at a time when China was systematising its agricultural sciences after the establishment of national research academies and agricultural universities in the 1950s. Plant protection as a taught discipline in China is older still: an International Plant Protection Convention presentation on phytosanitary education records that courses in plant pathology and entomology were opened as early as 1905 in the College of Agriculture of the Imperial University of Peking, that the first Chinese paper using the term plant quarantine was published in 1927, and that Beijing Agricultural University — a predecessor institution of China Agricultural University — maintained a Department of Plant Protection whose staff published actively in this journal's pages. A national research journal, as distinct from provincial bulletins, gave that community a single archive.

Sponsors: university and society

The journal's sponsorship joins the two pillars of Chinese plant-protection science. China Agricultural University is among the country's leading agricultural universities and the institutional descendant of the Beijing agricultural institutions where plant pathology and entomology were first taught in China; its plant-protection researchers appear throughout the journal's author lists, from the Beijing Agricultural University plant-protection department papers of the AGRIS record to present-day work from the university's entomology department on insecticide-resistance baselines for the fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda, conducted with the National Agrotechnical Extension and Service Center. The China Society of Plant Protection is the discipline's national society, and its association gives the journal a constituency that extends beyond one campus to the plant-protection institutes of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the provincial academies and the plant-protection stations that form China's pest-monitoring network. Research from the Institute of Plant Protection of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences — founded in 1957, with core disciplines spanning plant pathology, agricultural entomology, pesticide science, weed science, biological control and invasive biology — represents the same disciplinary breadth that the journal covers.

Scope across the plant-protection disciplines

The journal publishes the four classic branches of plant protection as research science. In plant pathology it carries work on fungal, bacterial and viral diseases of cereals, vegetables and fruit crops: identification of pathogens, disease epidemiology, varietal resistance and control, illustrated in its record by studies ranging from citrus diseases and vegetable soft rots in its earlier decades to modern resistance work. In agricultural entomology it publishes pest biology, population ecology, migration and control — including the well-known radar-entomology tradition represented by a 1992 paper in volume 19 on radar observation of the autumn migration of the meadow moth. In pesticide science it covers insecticide, fungicide and herbicide evaluation, application technology and, increasingly, resistance and environmental behaviour. In weed science and in the newer areas of biological control and integrated pest management it publishes work on natural enemies, microbial agents and combined control systems. The mix is deliberately that of a general disciplinary journal: a single issue can move from a virus identification paper to a field trial of control tactics against rice planthoppers and sheath blight, as its 1993 volume illustrates.

Research character shown by its published record

Specific papers show the journal's working character better than any scope statement. A 2014 study in volume 41 measured the selective toxicity of seven neonicotinoid insecticides to the fungus gnat Bradysia odoriphaga and to the earthworm Eisenia foetida — a pairing that captures the journal's dual concern with efficacy against a pest and safety toward a beneficial soil organism. A 2007 paper in volume 34 evaluated the resistance of transgenic Bt maize expressing cry1Ab to the Oriental armyworm, Mythimna separata, placing the journal inside China's assessment of genetically modified crop protection. Earlier volumes contain the building blocks of Chinese integrated pest management: studies of mixed economic thresholds for rice planthoppers combined with sheath blight, of attractive crops interplanted in cotton to conserve natural enemies of cotton pests, and of endophytic bacteria colonising watermelon and suppressing Fusarium wilt. These are not review or extension pieces but primary research reports with field and laboratory data, typically published in Chinese with English summaries, as the AGRIS records note — the format through which Chinese plant-protection results have traditionally been archived for domestic use and international abstracting.

Indexing, standing and the core-journal system

Within China the journal holds the standing of a Chinese core journal and a CSCD source title, the two domestic systems by which Chinese universities and institutes evaluate publication quality. Internationally, its traceability runs through agricultural and scientific abstracting: AGRIS records supplied by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences' information institute document its articles from the 1980s onward with subject indexing in several languages, J-GLOBAL records it in Japan's science and technology database, and its papers are cited in international reviews of Chinese pest management, remote sensing for pest management and crop-protection history. That combination — domestic core status plus decades of international abstracting under a stable ISSN — is what makes the journal usable as a historical source: a bibliometrician can follow Chinese research on a single pest, such as the cotton bollworm Helicoverpa armigera and its pyrethroid resistance, through the journal's records across the 1990s and 2000s.

Distinction from Plant Protection and other neighbours

The journal must be distinguished from its closest namesake. Plant Protection, in Chinese Zhiwu Baohu, is a separate Beijing-published practitioner magazine in the same field, with a different ISSN, different sponsors and a different article type — shorter, practice-oriented guidance for plant-protection technicians rather than full research papers. The two titles are frequently confused in translation because their Chinese names differ by a single word, Xuebao, the suffix that marks a scholarly journal. The Journal of Plant Protection is likewise distinct from Acta Phytopathologica Sinica, the plant-pathology-only journal whose name differs by a few letters in Latin rendering, and from the specialist titles that have grown out of its broad field, such as the Chinese Journal of Biological Control, sponsored by the Institute of Plant Protection of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the China Society of Plant Protection since 1985. Overseas, it shares its English name in translation with journals in Poland, Iran and Egypt, none of which has any connection with the Beijing title; ISSN 0577-7518 is the reliable discriminator.

Editorial standards and the journal today

The journal's official website, zwbhxb.cn, presents it to authors under its English name, Journal of Plant Protection, and publishes formal statements on publication ethics, corrections and retractions — committing the journal to issuing corrections and retractions in its current issues when the record requires amendment. That apparatus reflects the standardisation of Chinese scholarly publishing in the CSCD era: peer-reviewed research articles, structured abstracts in Chinese and English, and explicit ethics policies aligned with international practice. The journal continues to serve the research front of a discipline whose importance to Chinese food security is direct: plant diseases, pests and weeds are among the largest controllable causes of crop loss, and the national monitoring and control system depends on exactly the kinds of results — resistance baselines for new invasive pests, thresholds for combined pest-and-disease management, toxicity data balancing control against soil and beneficial organisms — that fill this journal's pages, as the fall armyworm insecticide-sensitivity work reported from China Agricultural University's entomologists illustrates.

Why the journal matters

For more than six decades the Journal of Plant Protection has been the general research archive of Chinese plant-protection science. Founded in 1962, sponsored from Beijing in association with China Agricultural University and the China Society of Plant Protection, and identified by ISSN 0577-7518, it has carried the discipline from the field-observation era of the 1960s — litchi stink bug biology and Dipterex trials — through the integrated pest management era of economic thresholds and natural-enemy conservation, to the present era of Bt crop evaluation, neonicotinoid ecotoxicology, radar-tracked pest migration and resistance management for newly invasive pests. Few Chinese agricultural journals offer so continuous a record of a single applied discipline, and none of its namesakes — not the practitioner magazine Plant Protection, not the pathology-only Acta Phytopathologica Sinica, and not the foreign journals that share its translated name — can substitute for it in that record.